Comment on Lmao
turdas@suppo.fi 6 hours agoApparently with 50% higher gravity it would be pretty much impossible with chemical rockets, but with the median of the estimate (so about 12.43 m/s^2^) it would be possible, you’d just need an incredibly large rocket, or non-chemical propulsion (e.g. nuclear).
A space program on that planet would definitely advance much slower than on Earth.
meco03211@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
How well funded have our space programs been? Maybe they aren’t diverting massive portions of their resources to war and can actually focus on space.
turdas@suppo.fi 6 hours ago
They were well funded back when their real goal was to develop ICBMs capable of delivering nukes.
atomicbocks@sh.itjust.works 5 hours ago
I get what you are saying, but the Saturn V was never intended to be an ICBM. Depending on what numbers you look at too, they weren’t actually that well funded. Some of the largest estimates that I’ve seen place NASA’s inflation adjusted budget between 1960 and 1973 at just under $600 billion. Or roughly half of what we’re spending in one year on the military currently.
To put it another way, at its absolute peak budget NASA received roughly 4.6% of the current military budget.
CheeseNoodle@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
Iirc near that +50% level you end up needing a saturn 5 to launch sputnik, so its more expensive to the degree that it might just be deamed unfeasable, at least at the technology level humans started launching rockets at.